Renaissance Man: Ben Affleck

After a stellar start in Hollywood, the actor got lost in a confusion of bad film choices and an overly public private life. But with 'Gone Baby Gone' and this fall's enthralling dramas 'The Company Men' and 'The Town' (his second turn behind the camera), he's proved himself better than ever

I discovered the charms of Ben Affleck 13 years ago, when he played Gunner in Going All the Way, a modest Sundance film set in 1950s Indianapolis, my hometown. A ­Korea vet in his early twenties, Gunner is newly home and looking for love, or at least some loving. As Affleck plays him, he's one of nature's golden boys, beautiful and self-assured. But instead of being smug, he's kind; when he takes a younger, less confident vet under his wing, the kid can barely believe his luck. Gunner reminded me of my favorite high school boyfriend: generous, funny, and wise enough to appreciate his good fortune. When I tell Affleck this, he lights up. "Oh ho, thank you!" he exclaims. "I love that little film. It probably didn't cost more than a few million, maybe less, but it had such good people—Rachel Weisz and Jeremy Davies and the director, Mark ­Pellington." Then he says a very golden-boy thing: "I loved spending the summer in Indianapolis." Really? Indianapolis summers were nice, but I wouldn't have
expected a movie star to think so.

With a little help from Gunner and a lot more from two other 1997 movies, Affleck became a golden boy for real. That year, he costarred in Chasing Amy, Kevin Smith's ingen­iously obscene R-rated romantic ­comedy and—the jackpot—in Gus Van Sant's megahit Good Will Hunting, which brought Affleck and his Latin school buddy Matt Damon the Oscar for best original screenplay and made both men stars.

Set mostly in a down-at-the-heels ­section of Boston, Good Will Hunting is the story of a scrappy young janitor (Damon) at a ­Harvard- or MIT-like university who is ­revealed to be a math genius and all-around intellectual prodigy. The movie combines drama, comedy, and romance, but its real subject is rare in American films: not just class, but class conflict. With its bristling town-and-gown tensions, it laid down a marker for a theme close to ­Affleck's heart, which he has lately come back to in some of the best work of his life.

Three years ago, Affleck made a stunning directing debut with Gone Baby Gone, a deeply ­character-driven crime drama based on a Dennis Lehane novel and set in Dorchester, another working-class part of Boston. Featuring a cast including his brother, Casey, and Morgan Freeman, it won a slew of critics' awards for Affleck and especially for Amy Ryan, a gifted stage actress who also got Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for her supporting turn as one of the worst, most memorable young mothers ever to walk the earth.

"I wish I could take the credit for Amy, but she just came in to audition and was amazing," Affleck says. He offered her the part on the spot—much to the chagrin of the producers and casting director.

"Apparently, it's just not done," Ryan says, and laughing, she describes how ­Affleck handled her second audition two weeks later. Telling the others he wanted her to read for him in private, "He ushered me into his office and said, `Listen. They think I'm too young and too much a novice, but I know what I like, and I want you in my movie—so, no, you don't have to read. This is just to make them think you did.' "

This fall, Affleck follows his earlier ­triumph with The Town and The Company Men—two other gripping, character-rich ­dramas. He stars in the second and directs and stars in the first, but in their different ways, both films explore the themes of getting and spending and haves and have-nots.

Written and directed by John Wells and costarring Chris Cooper and Tommy Lee Jones, The Company Men leaps from the ­evening news: To bolster the falling stock price of their firm, the dizzyingly rich men at the top of a multipronged corporation fire thousands of ­employees, including some who thought they were safe. Affleck's cocky, successful sales manager now faces the prospect of returning to the humble roots he worked so hard to escape.

In The Town, which Affleck adapted from the Chuck Hogan novel Prince of Thieves, he plays Doug MacRay, the restlessly intelligent leader of a pack of young bank robbers, and sure enough, the setting is a working-class part of Boston. But this time, the area, Charlestown, is rapidly ­gentrifying its Irish denizens out of their homes, and Doug finds himself falling for the assistant bank manager (played by ­Rebecca Hall) whom the gang—against his ­wishes—blindfolded and briefly took hostage. The movie runs on two tracks—the burgeoning but impossible love story, and the furious pursuit of Doug by Jon Hamm's FBI man, Frawley. That it's hard to say which of these narrative threads is more suspenseful is a tribute to the director's control of his complicated material.

Affleck is like a homing pigeon with these movies. He loaded Gone Baby Gone and The Town with local nonactors, who, as Ryan points out, are more challenging to work with than pros. Affleck wasn't just upping the ­realism, he was correcting the record. "People think of Boston as just white and Irish," he says, "but in fact there are all kinds of ethnicities."

Technically, Affleck is a California boy, born in Berkeley and now settled in Los Angeles with Jennifer Garner and their little daughters. But the roots that call to him as a filmmaker are in Boston. Describing his own town-and-gown divide, he says, "My mother went to Radcliffe, and rather than just trying to get rich, she wanted to be a teacher and taught for over 30 years in the public schools. She's ­definitely got some war stories." As for his dad, "He was the other side of it—a working guy, a bartender, and later a janitor at Harvard, actually, which informed a bit of Good Will Hunting, except my father was not a genius."

His parents split up when Ben was 11, and his father, an alcoholic, eventually ­entered a
no-nonsense recovery center—"definitely not Betty Ford," his son says wryly—and went on to become an alcoholism counselor. Affleck speaks courteously about his dad, but when he talks about his mother—"an extremely bright woman"—his voice is full of love. They lived in Cambridge, but near Central Square, a rough neighborhood at the time.

Class even turns up in 2003's Daredevil, which stars Affleck as a blind superhero whose single-parent dad was a hard-drinking, washed-up boxer. Affleck isn't bad, and neither is ­Garner as the martial-arts fighter who would become his love interest, offscreen as well as on. But Daredevil is that hapless thing, an action movie so leadenly paced that it never gets off the ground. Worse, it was just the sort of big-­paycheck blockbuster that was starting to clog Affleck's filmography. (All his films combined have so far earned $1.4 billion.)

Affleck was 25 when fame and adulation fell on him like a very large brick. By 1999, when People magazine anointed him one of the 50 most beautiful creatures in the universe, or maybe just the world, he was tabloid fodder. When he and Jennifer Lopez announced their engagement in 2002, the gossip media created a monster called Bennifer: foolish, flashy, and extra­vagant, throwing money around in ­unseemly but enviable ways. But the year ­before, Affleck had made a significant move ­toward putting the brakes on, entering a Malibu rehab that used the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Affleck and Lopez's relationship ended in late 2003, and she recently revealed that he broke it off. In 2004, she married Marc Anthony, with whom she now has twins, and a year later he married Garner.

Although what Affleck calls "the celebrity magazine–Internet circus" eventually stopped mining his life for scandal, a cloud lingered over his work, as if dumb movies meant that he was a dumb actor. Affleck isn't a dumb anything, but in those lucrative, lazily written roles that must surely have bored him, he tends to look a little glazed. It's hard to breathe life into lines that just lie there like a lox.

"As an actor, you try out all these things, and sometimes, despite what you want, it turns out differently than you would have liked," Affleck says, "and I was frustrated with that. I thought, Either I'm going to live by what other people think, or I'm going to ­believe in myself. That was the sharpest and maybe the most defining choice I felt I had to make, and it kind of freed me from worry. That's when I did Hollywoodland and Gone Baby Gone, which took almost two years, and then I just waited to do things that were good. Doesn't mean I was snobby about it."

No, indeed. Last year, Affleck did He's Just Not That Into You, a mainstream rom-com that made me want to strangle someone—but not him. In the elegantly simple role of a man whose love for his partner is forthright and true—art imitating life?—he's the best thing in the movie.

That's also the case with Hollywoodland, a flawed but compelling 2006 semi-noir about George Reeves, who became famous in the '50s as the first Superman but was desperate for ­respect as a serious actor. The gamble paid off for Affleck, who, unlike the poignant figure he plays with such layered subtlety, saw his own reputation fully ­restored.

Affleck has done some of his most inspiring work in offbeat roles like ­that of ­Bartleby, in ­another impious Kevin Smith comedy, Dogma. As one of a pair of angels expelled from heaven (the other is Matt ­Damon's Loki), Affleck ­mostly plays the part for laughs. But there's an astounding moment when, furious at the thought that he'll never again know grace, ­Bartleby ­explodes in such rage and anguish that, no matter one's beliefs or lack of them, God and heaven are suddenly real, and to be without them is—what else?—palpable hell. The scene has a bleakly humorous edge, but it just knocks you off your pins.

That's how Jon Hamm felt when he saw Gone Baby Gone. "Like a lot of people, I was blown away by it," Hamm says. "Now, knowing him, it's not surprising. He's wickedly intel­ligent and has an incredibly curious mind. He thinks in full thoughts, not sort of piecemeal, and that translates into his film work, especially his writing."

Recently, Affleck ran into Morgan Freeman, who he says asked him (he drops into a perfect imitation of Freeman's distinctive voice), "How old are you now?" and when Affleck told him 37, Freeman said, "Ah, that's the years you come runnin' to your prime."

That's certainly true if you're in a good place, and Affleck's could hardly be better. He loves his family and the way they ­anchor him. Talking about Garner and the girls, Violet and Seraphina, he doesn't sound sentimental so much as gleeful, like a man who's hit another jackpot, one that will last. Asked if he wants to continue directing, he says, "Yes. I've worked harder at it than anything I've ever done, and I'm sure I won't be successful every time out. But I love directing."

On top of everything else, in March ­Affleck founded the Eastern Congo Initiative, a project he quietly devised over a two-year period of
research, inter­mittent travel in Africa, and fundraising. The organization will distribute grants to ­community-based, Congolese-run projects and facilities, from hospitals and schools to care­fully designed recovery programs for former child soldiers who were forced to kill, and for the seemingly countless women so brutally ­violated in the ongoing conflict that they give terrible new meaning to the term war torn.

As for what inspired Affleck to do this, the answer is Hollywood. "I was walking down the street, and people were taking my picture, and it just felt like a lot of waste," he says. "And I thought, God, I'm not doing anything that's ­really important, and I can. All I have to do is just do it." So he did.